Christine Aaron approaches elegiac content through a lush
materiality. Using wax, oxidized metal, mirror, wood, paper, and fabric, as
well as encaustic, photography and printmaking, Aaron creates works that hint
rather than extol. Her varied materials exhibit a delicate physicality, vehicles
for meaning through their tangible presence. Playing opaque materials in
tension with transparent illusionistic imagery, she manipulates her mediums in insistent
ways, revealing content through process. Her method is investigative,
exploratory, an act of finding rather than directing the work. Despite the
strong, often heavy materials, the work maintains a sense of ethereal vulnerability.
Memory, loss, and the beauty of the degraded and timeworn, all feature
prominently in Aaron’s work.

Trees, for Aaron, are a symbolic language. Acting as
metaphors for souls, trees carry the imagistic content of the work and speak of
the ineffable. They are representations of time passing, cycles of life hidden
in the growth rings. Resembling people in a psychological drama, they stand
witness to the private stories held within all our bodies. Silent and watchful,
her forests become proxies— of families, communities, ancestors and descendants,
the living and the dead. Like families, they can seem at once ominous and
protective, diligent and attentive, safe and fearsome. In ghostly photographic
images printed onto her many different surfaces, the trees are a constant
presence.

Aaron also incorporates text directly onto the surfaces of
most of her paintings, prints, and objects. Recognizable as longhand, yet
barely readable under the degraded surface, the text acts as both a visual and
conceptual form. The words might reference lost letters, words spoken into
history, or thoughts parading constantly through our minds. The scripts appear
personal, captured words hinting back at the intimacy of the narrative. The
text swims in and out of the images, as though one is walking through Aaron’s
psychological forest while voices murmur all around. Although literally silent,
these works seem to have sound emanating from them, of voices or trees
rustling. Coming from outside or inside your body, from past, present and even
future imaginings, the paintings whisper, as though reaching through time and
space.

In the metal pieces, she repeatedly oxidizes the surface
until ravaged and timeworn, as though they are discovered artifacts dug up in
an abandoned ruin. This ruin reveals a narrative marred by time, its forgotten
stories leaving only traces. The oxidation process literally ages the metal in
the most direct interpretation of the passage of time, corroding the surface
into pitted multicolored rust. The imprinted images of trees and written
passages of text are embedded deep into the material so as to seem born up
through it. Although she incorporates wax into the metal pieces, its presence
is less felt— the metal’s physicality and weight insists on its foregrounded
role.

Wax is more explicit in the encaustic works on paper and
panel, where time seems represented by veils of smoky haze. An obscuring rather than a reenactment of time’s
ravages, here images of trees and text are buried in layers of the filmy wax. Covered
rather than excavated as in the metal works, they appear more like a memory or dream
than a physical relic. The half hidden images reflect the brain’s adaptive
mechanism of remembering and forgetting. The ethereality of the imagery contrasts
with the opaque certainty of the material surfaces, which insist on bringing us
back to the corporeal effects of time’s depredation. The tension between the
mind’s remembrances and the undeniability of the tangible body forms a core of
content in Aaron’s work.

Already a physical artist in her use of metal, wax, wood and
other visceral materials, in this exhibition Aaron follows a natural evolution in
expanding the work off the wall and away from the strictly two-dimensional. Her
first foray into installation seems to have grown organically, as the
materiality of the objects grows more assertive in its demand for space. In Murmur, she creates a smaller fluid
environment within the larger gallery space. This development manages to expand
the physicality of the work while maintaining the sense of fragility. The tree
images have migrated onto sheer paper panels, hung from floor to ceiling and
arranged in a loose grouping. The images shimmer and sway with the paper’s
movements as you walk among them, the paper adding another sound element
reminiscent of leaves rustling. In another installation, Aaron brings the tree
literally into the work. Using tree trunks and thin wood slabs that stand at
human scale, she inscribes the surfaces with text and clusters them around the
space. Both installations feel as though one is walking inside the artist’s
imagined forest memory.

Aaron also incorporates actual sound for the first time,
reflecting again the paintings’ expansion beyond the two-dimensional by moving
into three and four-dimensional space. Barely audible recordings of stories
told to her are played quietly— as in the paintings nothing is frontal. Like a
hum emanating from the work, this development reflects Aaron’s desire, and that
of the work itself, to move into real space in a created environment. To
actually travel through the work in a more interactive and participatory
fashion pulls the viewer into the story in a more experiential way. As though
the paintings have come alive, we enter their magic realist space and move
through it in physical time, surrounded by the artist’s world rather than
passively watching.

Christine Aaron’s work feels novelistic, not in a linear
sense, but in the way a novel unfolds in observed time. At first images of
trees and rusted metal may seem simply familiar, beautiful, and seductive in
their expression, until they begin to speak, to sway, to invite you into their
midst. The theme of materials obscuring while subtly revealing appears
throughout Aaron’s work, as though her materials are a declarative scrim
through which we are encouraged to view the immaterial. In viewing, we work
backwards through them, following the pathway forged by the artist. In the
process we find hinted narratives, glimpses of memory, moments lost to time. In
the end, if we stay long enough, they may welcome us into a dream-like
exploration of time, memory and the nature of being. We cannot know the whole
of the story, we see only through a glass darkly. Our own experience is left to
fill in the lost parts. Expressed through a love of materials and a kind of
ruined beauty, Aaron seduces us into her tactile and quietly haunting world.